02/03/2023 - The new movie by Sydney Sibilia, who directed I Can Quit Whenever I Want, recounts the rise and fall of the king of pirate cassette tapes in Naples, and is a breath of fresh air for Italian comedy

Giuseppe Arena, Luigi D’Oriano and Emanuele Palumbo in Mixed by Erry

There was a time when you’d win the heart of the one you loved by making them a mixed tape of your favourite songs and gifting it to them, serenade-style. In the Forcella district of Naples, in the 1970s, a boy by the name of Enrico Frattasio harboured ambitions of becoming a DJ while working as a cleaner in a record shop. He started to make mixed tapes for his friends out the back, which soon became highly sought-after. Then he got the brilliant but misguided idea to produce copies of albums on a far larger scale. Together with his brothers Peppe and Angelo, he established a financial empire… Of a seriously illegal kind.

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All this is a true story and it’s central to Mixed by Erry [+see also:
trailer
film profile], the new comedy by the “phenomenon” Sydney Sibilia (his trilogy I Can Quit Whenever I Want [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Sydney Sibilia
film profile] earned somewhere in the region of 12 million euros at the Italian box office, and was sold in more than 14 countries, whereas Rose Island [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], distributed by Netflix in 2020, received a comparatively lukewarm response), which is released in Italy on 2 March via 01 Distribution.

The premise for Mixed by Erry is similar to that of I Can Quit Whenever I Want and shared by countless Anglo Saxon and international films: bad boys are so likeable (or charming, or sexy) that viewers can easily forgive them their crimes. In fact, the director explicitly asks us to identify with the villain, and his rise and fall. “I just wanted to be a DJ”, Enrico Frattasio supposedly replied to the chief justice’s question: “do you declare yourself guilty or innocent?”. This isn’t a spoiler, it’s a fact. The “pirates” in question, who had nonchalantly broken all the rules on copywriting, royalties and under-invoicing, accumulating billions of lire, ended up being sentenced to a few years in prison. According to a Nielsen report at the time which is shown in the film, “Mixed by Erry” became the third-biggest record label in Italy, a phantom label which rubbed shoulders with such giants as Rca and Sony. And before it was shut down – before progressing to counterfeiting newly born CDs – it had sold 180 million cassettes throughout the country.

Played with spontaneity and verve by Luigi D’Oriano, rapper Emanuele Palumbo and Giuseppe Arena, the three brothers make their way – sometime in a yellow Lamborghini with gull-wing doors - through a jungle-style Naples, where Camorra families wage war on one another wielding machine guns. Our naive criminals go unnoticed, until their business becomes so obvious it attracts the attention of gang bosses and the Finance Police. Exploiting the widespread network leveraged by cigarette smugglers, which has just been dismantled by Captain Ricciardi, they draw the gaze of the hardcore cop played by Francesco di Leva, who clearly had fun with this role.

“I just wanted to be a DJ” is the key to understanding the hero’s moral philosophy, who believed “you can’t stop the music”. If, for example, you were to buy a pirated cassette of the Spandau Ballet album True, at the end of the tape DJ Erry would treat you to two Duran Duran tracks, in a kind of Spotify-style “if you like this, you might also enjoy…”. And this was how he circulated music. Not without stereotypes, yet happily endowed with a healthy dose of causticity, Mixed by Erry is a breath of fresh air in the Italian comedy landscape, and is bound to bring audiences to cinemas. In fact, the marketing machine is already in motion and the real Erry, now an honest gift box salesman, has been seen mixing records, wearing his trademark headphones at the Modernissimo cinema where his film enjoyed its Neapolitan premiere.

Mixed by Erry is produced by Groenlandia together with RAI Cinema, in collaboration with Netflix.

(Translated from Italian)